Seagate are the hard drive guys. They make some of the best HDDs out there but they’ve never gotten into the SSD game. Why is that? Everybody’s doing it, right? Yes, says CEO Bill Watkins, but nobody’s making any money and nobody’s making anything that different from one another. Why get into a business where there’s no money or reputation to be made? He said the same thing eight months ago, and although there are many solid-state notebooks around, they’re still a micro-minority, so I’d say he was more or less in the right.
They are planning, they say, on having a limited entry into the SSD market in mid-2009, but they’re banking on other technologies as well, which may end up taking a bite out of solid-state’s market share over the next couple years. Not this stuff though, probably.
Hahahahahahaha, I just noticed the Pixelmator watermark. Oh well.
Today, Acer and Seagate announced that the TravelMate series of notebooks will now be equipped with 2.5-inch Seagate Momentus 5400.6 hard drives up to 500GB with a transfer rate of 87MB/s. The drives are ultra quiet because of SoftSonic fluid-dynamic bearing motors and they’re capable of withstanding 1,000 Gs of non-operating shock and 350 Gs of operating shock. And as is the usual these days, the drives come with sensors that detect free falls, so your drives don’t get borked.
What can you get for $145? Well, you can buy Lehman Brother’s European assets 73 times, or you can get this 1TB eternal hard drive. At this rate, I’d say the hard drive is the better deal.
It’s the Seagate FreeAgent Desktop, and while I’ve never used this particular model, Seagate makes a mean hard drive most of the time. If that’s not a ringing endorsement, I don’t know what is.
A few years ago, a 512MB memory card was a huge deal. MP3 players used to have 128MB internal storage and the iPod was a monster at 40GB. Now time-travel into the future where the FreeAgent Go 500GB drive first half a terabyte of storage into a package a little bigger than an iPhone.
This slim drive has one port – a mini-USB port that connects either to a Y-USB cable – one that requires two jacks for unpowered USB – or a standard cable. Once it’s powered up you can use it on Macs or PCs. The drive costs $240.
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You can get a half a terabyte Seagate external hard drive for only $89 and when you throw in shipping, for less than a bill. Come on, that’s not bad. Ships from BuyNow Incorporated through Amazon, but the company is rock’n five stars with 12,803 ratings. Not too shabby at all.
Not to be outdone by Western Digital, Seagate announced a plethora of external hard drives today under the FreeAgent series. Moreover, a couple of the FreeAgents are touting ‘firsts.’ The FreeAgent Go, pictured above in the dock, is the most anorexic external drive in all the industry with a height of 12.5mm and comes with shock/vibration protection. But that’s not the only first for the Go. It even has a desktop docking option. Capacities available are 250GB, 320GB and 500GB for $120, $150 and $240, respectively. The Go Drive for Macs are a little more and only come in 250GB and 320GB capacties for $160 and $190. But these ones have FireWire 800/400 ports, docking station and carrying case. Both PC and Mac versions are available this month.
Read on for the rest.
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There is a nausiating amount of ‘08 Olympic video coverage this year, and all we really want to watch is a little Table Tennis. There is so much video recording that for every 24 hour day, there is 212 hours being recorded onto massive media servers. Seagate hooked NBC up with 20 Omneon MediaDeck servers that hold a total of 500,000 gigabytes, or 500 terabytes, for the task. Plus, while the video is being recorded and stored in China, a second array in NYC is also storing the info. Crazy.
So far the equipment seems to be doing the job as the HD video feeds have looked great and we haven’t seen, nor heard, of any picture issues.
[photo source: Flickr]
UPDATE: Brian from central NC has spotted a good amount of HD issues on his Time Warner hookup. Anyone else?
Seagate has just given storage a bump across the board with the introduction of a 1.5-terabyte 3.5-inch hard drive – the Barracuda 7200.11 (running at 7,200 RPM) – and two 500-gigabyte 2.5-inch drives – the Momentus 5400.6 and Momentus 7200.4 (running at 5400 RPM and 7200 RPM, respectively).
All three drives use the Serial ATA interface, the two 7,200 RPM drives sling data around at 3GB/second. Seagate says the Momentus 7200.4 laptop drive “delivers true desktop performance,” while maximizing battery life.
No word on pricing yet but the desktop drive should ship in August, while the laptop drives will ship sometime in the fourth quarter.
[via I4U]
Not too much to say about this other than yes, it’s big.
7200RPM, 3.5 inches, and a lot of space for all your legitimate and tasteful media. If you’re eco-conscious, however, it’s probably better to go with their new line of 1TB drives, which use much less power. Or, if you’re rich, a few Memoright arrays are the way to go.
The world of 2.5-inch HDDs is generally that of notebook computers, but sometimes they make sense in high-end servers. Sadly, that’s the case for Seagate’s latest 2.5-inch drives, which boast 320GB storage as well as a 10k RPM speed, meaning they are bloody fast.
It’s called the Savvio, and is made for enterprise servers and storage devices. It’s not going into any laptops soon, and that’s too bad. We’d love to upgrade to this thing, but it uses SAS instead of ATA or IDE, as laptops do.
Still, the fact that they can get the speed and capacity into this small of a form factor means that such drives for laptops might not be far off.
Solid state drives have always excelled in power economy and heat levels, but have faltered in the price-to-performance ratio, and even lagged behind in sheer performance by some measures. That last complaint is valid no longer. Memoright’s high-speed drives operate at far higher speeds than other SSDs on the market, and show nearly double the performance of the closest competitors in the spinning disk category where it counts — or more. 
With four 32GB modules in RAID 0 configuration, the Memorights showed read and write speeds of 450MB/S and 323MB/s, respectively. That’s madness, friend. Their I/O counts are off the charts as well, I’m talking like 20 times HDD performance.
It’s not a total shutout, of course; the WD VelociRaptor is comparable on several measures but gets its ass handed to it on just as many. And it’s worth noting that the Memoright modules cost fully ten times as much ($1000 per 32GB). But when Tom’s Hardware goes this gaga over something, you know it’s worth the cash if you’ve got it.
The take-away message here is that the performance gap between SSD and HDD has been decisively closed; it’s now just a matter of getting that price down. Man, I can’t stop thinking about that 0.45GB/s read speed. I’m freaking out here.
Seagate holds a patent for some aspects of drive/PC communication and may just start enforcing those selfsame patents if this whole SSD craze takes off.
But the key thing, Watkins argues, is that SSDs are just too expensive, and will be for a long time. Just look at the MacBook Air. There are two versions of the Apple laptop, one with an 80 GB hard drive for $1,800, and one with a 64 GB SSD for $3,100. Why pay so much more for less storage? It’s not a difficult choice.
“Realistically, I just don’t see the flash notebook sell,” Watkins says. “We just don’t see the proposition.”
But in case flash prices continue to plummet and the flash drives really do catch on, Watkins has something else up his sleeve. He’s convinced, he confides, that SSD makers like Samsung and Intel (INTC) are violating Seagate’s patents. (An Intel spokeswoman says the company doesn’t comment on speculation.) Seagate and Western Digital (WDC), two of the major hard drive makers, have patents that deal with many of the ways a storage device communicates with a computer, Watkins says. It stands to reason that sooner or later, Seagate will sue – particularly if it looks like SSDs could become a real threat.
Flash vs. hard drive battle heats up [Fortune]
Product Name: Seagate BlackArmor encrypted++ portable hard drives
Description: A 160GB portable hdd with government-level encryption. That’s only good if you put faith in our government to be competent.
Price: $150
In-store date: Q1 2008
Site: Seagate
Why it’s cool: Because people are paranoid about their data being compromised while on-the-go. $150 for 160GB rides the high-end of the price curve, it should be noted, so you’ll really need to place a premium on data security to fully appreciate the drive. It’s pretty shiny, though. Still, shiny = cool, right?
Product Name: Seagate PipelineHD Series Hard Disc Drives
Description: A hard drive that’s specifically built for high def DVRs with (initially) up to 1TB in storage space
Price: TBA
In-store date: First-half of 2008
Site: Seagate
Why it’s cool: Because storing high def, DVR’d content takes up an obscene amount of space. PipelineHD is not only large enough for 200 hours, or 8.3 days, of high-def content, but it uses propreitary technology to be as quiet as possible—nothing kills the charm of movies like “Once” like the ear-piercing sound of HDD access.
It’s bad enough that my MacBook is running hotter than Hades since I upgraded to Leopard, but the last thing I need is for my HDD to crap out. Luckily my MB does not have a 2.5-inch drive from Seagate. Retrodata, a data recovery outfit in the UK, noticed something was amiss with the Seagate drive equipped MBs as they’ve seen 50 or so since last summer. Upon further inspection, Retrodata pinpointed the cause to be:
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We don’t normally discuss class action lawsuits here on the Gear, mostly because we’re not fond of fostering the idea that lawyers can do good. In this case, however, you’re very possibly due for a bate for 5% from Seagate, if you’ve purchased one of its harddrives in the last six years. That’s enough money to get you most of the way to the Transformers DVD. Read More
Photo via Jason Dunn
Seagate, the company that I think I bought my first hard drive from, will stop selling IDE drives by year’s end, focusing exclusively on SATA. SATA currently is currently found in more than half of total desktops sold this year and 44 percent of laptops sold.
Don’t expect IDE to go the way of the Dodo, however. Like all good standards (when’s the last time you used your serial port?), it will remain on motherboards for years to come some some sort of desiccated internal organ. Mmmm… desiccated organs.
Report: Seagate plans to stop manufacturing IDE drives by year end [Ars]
Seagate announced a 1TB hard drive today, albeit late, but as they say, “better late than never.” The Barracuda 7200.11 and ES.2 revv up to 7,200rpm, cache up to 32MB with an average data rate of 8.5ms. The ES.2 is leading the pack offering consumers a SAS interface along with SATA and is aimed for archive and secondary drive usage. The 7200.11 is as quiet as a mouse with only 2.7 Bels. Both drives will ship Q3 and the 7200.11 will retail for $399.99, while the ES.2 is still without a price tag. Now watch Marc Jourlait, Seagate VP of Global Marketing, give his spiel.
Press Release
Looking at a device like Seagate’s FreeAgent Go 160 GB makes the average user yawn. Storage? 160GB? Feh. Boring.
But Seagate has some tricks up its sleeve. In affect, the FreeAgent Go is your computer’s environment and personality in the palm of your hand. It’s a storage product that’s focused on always traveling, location-moving, iPod-toting, digital-camera-snapping, video-taping folks. Generally, it’s a device made just for us geeks.
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Anyone care to hypothesize what’s happening here? Send emails to contest at crunchgear dot com by Monday for fabulous prizes
Well boys and girls, I’m now planted firmly in Austin for this year’s South by Southwest (SXSW). My trip to GDC 2007 reared a few interesting items like Emotiv’s Project Epoc and a nice case of laryngitis. The voice is is a hoarse wisp of my regular boom, but I’m getting by as best I can. It is, I suspect, nothing that copious amounts of alcohol can’t resolve. In the meantime I’m wandering around like a mute, absorbing everything through sight and sound.
So what have I experienced so far? I’m glad you asked: Read More
